How to Plan a Complete Website Redesign Without Losing Your Search Engine Rankings

The majority of websites that go through redesigns don't lose rankings because the new site is badly designed. They lose rankings because the structure, content, and optimization of the old site didn't influence the new one nearly enough. Then everything changes all at once, including some things that shouldn't have. Marketing knowledge not only doesn't inform the new design, it often gets left behind entirely in the launch of the new site.

As people who live and breathe SEO, let's look at how we can be best poised to bring sites into the world in ways that are the least disruptive of organic search positions.

Audit everything before anyone touches a design file

Before you even start planning what the structure of your new site will look like, you should go all archivist on your existing site. That means gathering up every last URL that search engines have in their index, downloading your backlinks, pulling your traffic by page on your analytics software, and noting where your target keywords rank in the search engines for your top traffic-driving pages. This may seem like a bit of a time-waster to some people, but these are all metrics you'll use to gauge the success of the relaunch, not to mention they're the best way to determine what's working on your website and what isn't.

But enough of that - onto the redesign! A lot of businesses won't bother to do any of that and make the mistake of thinking they can just plug in their better-looking site at the end. The problem is that while you might not like the design of some of your pages, they might be your best when it comes to repeat visitors and organic traffic. If the old website's stats and your reports aren't used to determine what content gets carried across, your designers will likely forget all about them.

Map keywords to pages before design starts

Once you understand what content you have and what is/isn't working, give each of the pages you're keeping or creating target keywords. Set the keyword mapping before the design, not after. This will determine the headings, page titles, and the volume of copy that each template needs to support.

All too often, this is the process instead: design sign-off, then let's try to fit some SEO copy into the boxes we've built. Truncated headings or missing subheadings, copy-and-pasting the same few paragraphs because a particular template only has enough space for two sentences... and so on. Decide what each page needs to say and rank for first. Let the design serve that.

Brief your web design team on SEO constraints early

Designers and SEO specialists often don't understand each other's world, and unfortunately, that's where search rankings can get lost. For example, a designer focusing on visual appeal might make semantic heading structure trade-offs for styled divs, overlook the alt text in favor of visually decorative text, or introduce a page speed problem directly into the build by using hero images that are too large and adding unnecessary animation.

None of this is a conscious subversion of the project. It's simply a difference in optimizing for appearance and optimizing for search. Your job, or your project manager's job, is to put SEO requirements on the table at the kickoff meeting, not after the first design review. This can include such things as a good heading hierarchy, fast-loading assets, a mobile-responsive design, and a URL structure that remains consistent unless for a very good reason.

This is where the choice of vendor matters. A professional web design perth company will understand how best to combine visual elements with technical SEO requirements simply because they've worked on some of those horror stories of the past where the two actually compete as separate areas of work. You should be looking for questions about your current rankings and possible sources of traffic before they even ask what you want people to feel when they visit your site.

Make a list of technical requirements and hand it over. They could be goals around improvements in the speed for certain metrics, improvements in the performance for certain metrics, or something as simple as ensuring that GSC can access every page you want it to. If your designer is working with the constraints of your SEO team's paper from day one, they can't build a slow site.

Build the redirect map and keep it updated

This step may seem simple and straightforward, but it is often the most problematic when doing a website migration and redesign. Many people know that they should redirect old URLs to new ones, yet they make errors in the process. This should be a permanent 301 redirect, one-to-one wherever possible. Avoid redirects that act temporarily, like 302s. Do not use JavaScript redirects, which aren't crawlable by search engines.

Also, make sure to avoid redirect chains. Each time a URL redirects to another, you lose a little "link juice". Also, keep in mind that redirecting from a penalized or spammy page could pass that negativity along to the destination - another reason to avoid chains.

Create a simple redirect map document, which maps URLs on the current site to the URLs on the updated site. Most CMS platforms have tools or modules available that will automatically redirect URLs. Keep your redirect map document handy because it'll help you determine the redirects needed. New pages will be created, and they probably will have different URLs, but you should always try to map URLs from the old site as best you can.

Use a staging environment that search engines can't index

Every redesign should have a space to build and test that can't be easily found by the public. A staging environment with password protection, or blocked by robots.txt and noindex, allows your team to see and experience the proposed changes before they get into any double jeopardy with search for new content.

A canonical tag identifies a duplicate page's preferred source, which helps avoid getting dinged by search for duplicate content. Even better is to ensure there are no duplicates to begin with. Most CMS platforms out there will let you create private, password-protected staging areas. Do this from the outset and begin reinforcing the habit of automatically blocking new dev and staging spaces as soon as they go live.

If your redesign includes a CMS or replatforming change, the staging environment is also where you test every single redirect. Do not assume that your new CMS will automatically map one-to-one from old URLs to new. You will almost certainly lose or change a few URLs along the way. Don't find this out on launch day.

Run the technical checklist before you launch

Before your new site goes online, here are the technical concerns that often aren't top of mind when your team is laser-focused on getting the design right, right now.

First, page load times. Google stats show 53% of mobile visits are abandoned if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load. A slow redesign is a conversion and revenue killer. Test your new pages as a mobile user on a poor connection - not just in the office.

Mobile responsiveness. Since Google's mobile-first indexing means the mobile version of your site is its main consideration, if the mobile version plays second-fiddle in your redesign, so will your search traffic.

Then check canonical tags in every template. Check internal linking, point and click. Make sure your analytics tags are in place: it's a small thing, but flying blind from the day the redesign launches can be humiliating.

One specific for your tech team: if HTTPS migration is bundled in with a redesign, expect tears before bedtime if your redirect rules and server settings aren't going to plan. Treat it as a separate task. It is one.

Migrate content without losing what made it work

Small invisible particles of SEO - lost in the migration. The metadata, image alt texts, heading hierarchy, and other minor details you probably never thought about because they were just there (we hope) didn't write themselves. You took care of them, back when the page was new, carefully crafting those seemingly insignificant details until they shone like little hidden jewels of SEO.

And now, in the hubbub of the redesign project, those hundreds of little things are at risk of being wiped from existence, back to some lazy defaults from the last template someone dropped and overwrote your invisible particles with.

Watch the first 60 days closely

Once the site is live, you still have work to do. Submit your new XML sitemap via Google Search Console immediately and do a quick check of robots.txt just to make sure that the build process didn't accidentally block something important.

For the next 30-60 days, you'll want to watch crawl errors, indexing status, and keyword rankings pretty closely. Generally speaking, a little up and down movement is to be expected as Google recrawls and reindexes your site. However, if you see any sustained drops with specific pages, it's usually a broken redirect, missing canonical, or that the content didn't migrate the way you thought it did, etc. The advantage here is that if you catch that early, you can fix it before you're negatively impacted from a traffic perspective.

A redesign is a great time to actually improve your rankings, not just try to ensure that you hold onto them. But that only happens when SEO is there from Day 1, not as a cleanup crew once the site goes live.